Günseli Başar

Günseli Başar — Biography

Günseli Başar became the first Turk to be crowned Miss Europe, winning the title in Naples in 1952, a year after she was named Miss Turkey. In 1955 she also modeled for the female figure of the Atatürk and Turkish Youth Monument in the garden of Istanbul University. After her pageant years she wrote a column for the newspaper Hürriyet, and she lived in Bodrum for many years.

She finished Erenköy Girls High School in Istanbul and went on to the Academy of Fine Arts. While still a student she entered a contest organized by the newspaper Cumhuriyet and was chosen Miss Turkey on 13 October 1951. Her teachers pressed her to compete in the European pageant in Naples, where she represented her country and won on 20 August 1952. Three years later she posed for the statue, a project that took about a year: she wore a Hellenistic dress, held her right arm up as if carrying a torch and stepped forward with her right leg like a soldier. She called it an honor to stand beside Atatürk as a representative of Turkish girls, and said she began to cry when she saw the finished statue years later.

In 1977, on an offer from Hürriyet's owner Erol Simavi, she began a column titled Günseli Oradaydı ("Günseli Was There"), travelling the country for about a year before she stopped, and she did not return to it afterwards. She married businessman Kutsi Beğdeş and later the then-mayor of İzmir, Faruk Tunca; she had a daughter from the second marriage. She died in Istanbul in April 2013, aged 81, and the press remembered her as Turkey's first Miss Europe.